Multi-vocal Landscapes: Mapping Mobile Ontologies onto the Northern Rio Grande

Summary

Forming a strategic corridor from the Southwest to the Plains, New Mexico’s northern frontier was an important site of cross-cultural interaction during the colonial period. It was on the fringes of the Spanish Empire that Hispano, Pueblo, Ute, Apache, and Comanche groups converged, generating new cultural identities and materials in the process. While archaeologists have long been interested in the particular ways in which Pueblo groups conceptualized and marked this region, the rich and diverse ways in which mobile groups have engaged with the Rio Grande landscape is less well known. Through a discussion of the archaeological remains of Ute, Apache, and Comanche groups I will explore the unique ways in which mobile groups make and mark space. Structuring this discussion is the belief that movement is the essential thread which binds together the social, economic, and spiritual worlds of mobile societies both in the past and in the present. As an indigenous ontology, mobility has important implications for how we as archaeologists interpret spaces, places, and things.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Applying Indigenous Frameworks for Archaeological Analysis and Interpretation

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14393